


Twilight of the Gods

by Barb Cummings (Rahirah)



Series: The Barbverse [120]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-20
Updated: 2009-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:29:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rahirah/pseuds/Barb%20Cummings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forty years later, a now-human Angel enlists Spike's help to stop a wizard from plunging the world into eternal winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twilight of the Gods

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in the same universe as _A Raising in the Sun_, _Necessary Evils_, et. al. (See the [Barbverse Timeline](http://sleepingjaguars.com/buffy/viewpage.php?page=timeline) for specifics.) It contains spoilers for previous works in the series. Written for the 2007 Lynnevitational. Thanks to germaine_pet for getting the band back together. Eternal gratitude to sgac, wildrider, slaymesoftly, gillo, kehf, typographer, bruttimabuoni, Rainkatt, partri65, deborahc, and hobgoblinn for slapping me upside the haid when I need it.

In Angel's dreams, all the trees were made of bones, and their skeletal fingers sieved the wind for the howls of wolves.

The pounding on the cabin door was barely audible over the moan of the storm, but it was enough to wake him out of restless slumber. He rarely slept through the night any longer; old habits, old impulses died hard, or so he told himself. Or perhaps it was only that the nights were so much longer now. Some time after midnight the snow had started to fall again, and he could hear the creak of pines bending to the lash of the wind. The pounding came again, insistent, along with a shout of "Oi! Let me in, you antiquated bastard! I'm freezing my balls off!"

Angel ran a thumb down the sleeping bag's thermal seal and rolled over, fumbling for the switch of the battery-powered lantern on the table beside his cot. Yellow light flooded the cabin, a sickly false dawn. The fire had gone out, any remaining coals smothered beneath a layer of ash as white as the snow outside. His breath hung on the bitter predawn air. Neither darkness nor chill would have mattered to him, once. Now the cold woke aches in his bones, the ghosts of old breaks and bruises. Shouldering into his coat, he swung both legs over the side of the cot and shoved his feet into unlaced boots - he'd slept in his clothes, partly for warmth, partly in anticipation of this. The floor was icy even through layers of wool and leather.

"Come in," he said, savoring the power in those two words. He slid the deadbolt. "You're late."

Wind slammed the door back against the wall. Spike blew inside, snowflakes eddying in his wake. He was wearing the same beaten-up black leather motorcycle jacket he'd worn for the last forty years - on the theory, no doubt, that it was just now getting properly broken in. "Yeh, well, took me a while. Not as young as I used to be," he shot back, stamping packed snow from the soles of his boots. He was limping, Angel noted, and there was a jagged tear in the leg of his jeans, its edges black and stiff with frozen blood. "And nobody mentioned the sodding blizzard. In sodding _August._ Or the sodding _wolves._ Liam, you ascetic freak, it's colder in here than out there!"

"I don't have a carbon permit." Angel put a shoulder to the door and forced it shut against the wind. "And the last thing we need is the Forest Service showing up." Not that it was likely that they would, in this weather. He caught Spike's arm, urgent. "Do you have it?"

"Fine, thanks, and so's the missus." Spike shrugged out of his backpack, yanked his earflapped cap off, and strode over to the fireplace, where he picked up the poker and gave the bed of ashes a few hopeful jabs. When that produced no results, he knelt and began piling on fuel from the wood box on the hearth. Angel made no move to stop him - as long as it was Spike wussing out first, a fire didn't sound like a bad idea. He watched, arms folded, as Spike ripped pages from the stack of yellowing magazines beside the fireplace, stuffed them under the logs and applied his lighter. Flame trembled, caught, and blossomed, orange tongues devouring the tinder and licking hungrily at the undersides of the logs.

"Ah, that's more like." Spike rose and stretched luxuriously. "Globe could use a bit more warming, you ask me. And yes, I've got your golden ticket." He noticed Angel staring, and cocked his head. "Wossmatter? Spinach farmer in my teeth?"

"Nothing. Just...it's been awhile."

"Ten years. Whose fault's that?" Spike wheeled away and began nosing around the cabin like an inquisitive terrier, opening cupboards and prodding at the meager contents. For all his grumbling, he still radiated the nervous, irrepressible energy of old. If you counted only the time they'd spent as mortals, he was two years older than Angel, but he could pass for ten years younger - whether that was the natural consequence of his demon blood, or just Spike's innate talent for being annoying, Angel could never decide.

Not that the years hadn't touched him. The short-cropped sandy-brown hair was liberally salted with grey now, and deep laugh-lines framed the blue eyes and mocking mouth. The sight of him pained in a way that Angel's own reflection never had. The old man in the mirror was a stranger. This was Spike, who'd once insisted so passionately that demons didn't change.

The demon in question held up a tin of unflavored oatmeal with a _tch_ of disgust. "What is this, a Sunday School retreat? No fire, no liquor, not even any sodding marshmallows..."

Angel bent to lace his boots, studiously maintaining a straight face. "The last thing you need is marshmallows." After all these years, Spike's fondness for hot wings and otter's blood was finally getting a march on his ferocious workout regimen. His lean frame was stockier now, and in profile it was apparent that he was starting to acquire a small but unmistakable gut.

"I've earned every ounce of it, mate," Spike replied cheerfully. "Anyway, ate on the road." He pulled a palm-sized golden disc from his coat pocket, flipped it, caught it, slapped it down on the cabin's small table. The alien designs inscribed upon its surface winked in the firelight. Outside the pitch of the wind changed, rising in a long-drawn howl of rage. "Here it is. I had trouble enough getting it, too - seems they don't let just anyone stroll into Tak'alik A'baj' and start rooting around in the altar-stones these days. You going to tell me what this little excursion's in service of now?"

"It's a long story." Angel picked up the disc, hands shaking with - not hope. Not yet. Too soon for that. He traced the glyphs with a finger, pulling up comparisons from all-too-accurate memory. On the opposite side, a snarling, stylized jaguar-face glared back at him.

Spike sighed and rummaged through an inside coat pocket, coming up with a pouch of contraband tobacco and a packet of Zig-Zags. "Well, I'm stuck here till sundown. Have to pass the time somehow." He tapped a shreddy brown line of tobacco onto the paper and cocked an eyebrow at the window. "Not that sunrise appears to be a problem at the moment."

Angel pulled a rickety wooden chair over to the table and sat down. He held up the disc, framed in his hands - big hands, and still powerful... for an old man's. "How long," he asked, "since you've seen it snow like this?"

Spike perched on the edge of the other chair and frowned, licking the edge of his rolling paper. He finished his masterpiece off with an expert twist of his fingers and committed his second (or possibly third) felony of the night by lighting up. "In California?"

"In anywhere."

Exhaling a plume of vile blue smoke, Spike glanced out at the swirling snow. "Been awhile," he admitted.

"Two years ago they called it El Nino," Angel said, spinning the disc. "Last year it was a freak fluctuation of the jet stream. This year it's a _disturbing climactic trend._ What are they going to call it next year?"

Spike laced his hands across his middle and rocked back on the chair's hind legs. "Why guess when you're itching to tell me?"

"They won't call it anything, because there won't be a next year. We're looking at worldwide crop failure, famine, war, refugees with nowhere to go - " Angel leaned forward, searching Spike's face - God knew Spike had never been remotely interested in politics, but how could he have ignored the pictures on the newsfeeds? Africa, Asia, Europe and North America - everywhere, crops froze on the tree or rotted in the ground, and spring brought only torrents of brown meltwater to rip the scant remaining topsoil from land that had been desert five years ago, cropland twenty years before that. Rivers of desperate, starving faces, too, converging on cities, on countries too overburdened to hold them - or to hold them back. Glaciers creeping down the flanks of mountains that had been bare of ice for twenty years. Fuji, Whitney, Everest, all hungry to take back what was rightfully theirs...

Blue eyes met his, as cold and indifferent - as soulless - as the storm outside. Of course Spike had seen - he just didn't care. Spike could grow old and die like a man, but he wasn't one. Or... no. Not completely indifferent. Marginally curious. Which for Spike was the equivalent of joining the Peace Corps. "Right. And how's that different from any point in the last...oh, forever? The world's fucked up. What else is new? We always bollocks on through somehow."

"This isn't just fucked up," Angel said tightly. "This is Fimbulwinter. There's a wizard who's performing a ritual to summon the wolf Skoll, who's going to eat the sun."

Spike looked skeptical. "Eternal darkness? Again? That trick never works. Ought to let the pillock go through with it."

There was no mistaking the expectant look in his eyes now - all his bitching was pro forma; for whatever inscrutable, amoral reason, Spike was just waiting to be talked around. Angel had no intention of obliging him. "I'll be heading out as soon as the sun's up. You can stay here till sunset. There's pig's blood in the cooler, and I left my truck parked a mile down the - "

"Hold on," Spike interrupted. "Who says I'm staying here?"

"You've done your part." Angel tapped the disc. "This isn't your fight. Go home."

"Oh, bosh," said Spike. "Any fight is my fight. You owe me, mate - you think it was hard getting hold of that trinket? It was nothing compared to getting away without Buffy asking awkward questions. That storm's not breaking any time soon. And if you think I'm going to let you ponce off and take all the world-saving credit after I bloody near drown myself fetching your tinkertoy there..." His gaze sharpened. "And speaking of Buffy..."

"She doesn't need to be involved in this." Angel felt a twinge of conscience and ruthlessly suppressed it. He tucked the disc into his own coat pocket. "And if Buffy's not involved, there's no percentage for you in looking heroic, is there? We don't have time, anyway. Everything's going down today. There's a spot higher up the mountainside. Ley lines, favorable mystic convergence, the usual."

Spike glared at him for a moment. He held up one hand and ticked off on his fingers, "No sun, no hops. No hops, no beer. Not in favor of a world sans beer. Not to mention the beleaguered tobacco industry. Hard enough to get a decent fag these days. No sense in making it harder. Bugger the Slayer, I'm in."

"You're saving the world for beer and cigarettes these days?"

For a moment Spike looked genuinely offended. Then he grinned. "You wouldn't believe me if I said it was for puppies and Christmas. 'Sides, it's been too long since I had a proper scrap. It's all politics and negotiations back in Sunnydale these days - you'd hate it. You're lucky to get a decent bar fight in a fortnight. It'll do me good to run some of this off." He patted his compact little paunch, stubbed his cigarette out and stretched, wincing a little as the muscles of his wounded leg pulled. "Naff business, this getting old. Ten years ago the buggers wouldn't have laid a fang on me." He tugged his cap down over his eyes, propped his boots up on the table, and settled back in his chair. "Wake me when it's apocalypse time, Grandpa."

****

Spike caught a quick cat-nap while Angel readied for the trip and waited for the sun. When it finally cleared the mountains, it was only a pale grey smudge in a dark grey sky. The pine-clad slopes of the Sierra Nevadas rose in a vast upsweep of stone around the cabin, their snowcapped peaks shorn off by the low-hanging clouds. Angel packed light: besides the disc he took canteen, knife, lighter, his cell, dry socks, a couple of energy bars, the Winchester Super X and an extra box of shells. Spike didn't bother with that much; when he woke up, he stuck a brace of throwing knives in his boots, a hip flask in his pocket, and left his backpack on the cabin floor. When Angel offered him a weapon, he laughed, shook his head, and said he didn't think he'd need one.

Showoff, Angel thought as he locked the cabin door behind them. You'd think he'd be used to it by now - Spike strolling lightly in and out of his life, making everything look so goddamned easy. He still had to remind himself that Spike hadn't known what the outcome of his choice would be, all those years ago. He'd had no reason beyond blind hope to think that the Mohra blood which had kick-started both their hearts would leave a soulless vampire anything other than a mindless hunk of meat. He'd taken the chance on life anyway, and gotten death as a gift with purchase. Angel didn't resent the fate that had made him a man again - how could he, under the circumstances? What galled wasn't that he was alive, but that Spike had chosen what he'd had forced upon him.

Oh, well. It could have been worse. The little bastard could have run off and gotten himself a soul.

"Where to?" Spike asked, sniffing the breeze. It was crap weather for tracking, but vampires relied on scent far more than even they realized - it had taken Angel years to get out of the habit of relying on his nose. He pointed to the line of dark fenceposts leading off across the snowbound meadow and disappearing into the shadow of the forest. Spike nodded, and set off in the lead, plowing through the thigh-high drifts of snow by main strength. Angel followed, toiling along in the smaller man's footsteps. Good King God Damn Wenceslas.

It was half a mile's trek to the forest's edge, with the shush-shush of wind in their ears all the way. The going grew no easier under the pines - they were heading uphill now, over ground made treacherous by hummocks and fallen branches half-hidden beneath the snow. The only sign of life was a raven in the branches overhead. It cocked a glittering black eye at them, cawed, and flapped heavily skyward.

The underbrush thinned as they climbed, heading into old-growth forest. Yellow pine and incense cedar gave way to red fir and lodgepole, their huge trunks rising from the mountainside like the columns of a vast, wintery cathedral. There were valleys older than time in these hills, sheltering trees that had been saplings when mankind was still battling the Old Ones to inherit the Earth. For the last four decades the forest had been beating a glacial retreat up the slopes, inch by inch, driven out of the foothills by summers that grew longer and winters that grew drier each year. Now the ice had returned to reclaim its due.

"Hsst," Spike whispered, laying a hand on Angel's shoulder. He stood at bird-dog attention, head cocked, nostrils flared. Angel strained his ears, but besides the wind and the creak of snow-burdened branches, their own heavy breathing was the only sound. Spike held up a finger, and then Angel heard it too, braided into the wind: the distant cry of a raven, and the howls of wolves.

"They've found us," Spike murmured. "And not by chance. They're aiming to cut us off. I only ran into three of 'em last night. There's more than that on the way now, I'll wager. "

"It doesn't matter," Angel said. "We keep going."

Spike remained motionless for a moment longer, head high, nostrils drinking in the wind. Then he nodded and set off, still following the sagging skein of barbed wire. Angel looked back along their trail uneasily. He might not have a vampire's sense of smell any longer, but he knew these woods, and he knew Spike. "You're positive you weren't followed?" Angel asked. "We - the guy we're after has eyes and ears everywhere."

"'Course I was followed." Spike swatted a low-hanging branch out of his way. The ice sheathing the drought-brown needles shattered and a shower of wet snow narrowly missed smacking Angel in the face. "Ran into a couple of inquisitive blokes in Bishop yesterday evening. Claimed to be investigating looted archeological sites." Yellow light flickered in his eyes. "Told you I'd eaten on the road." With the air of someone adding a tiresome but necessary legal disclaimer, he added, "I didn't kill 'em. Much."

If Buffy were here, there'd be a furious argument about that. Buffy still cared about things like the lives of random strangers. Some day he'd have to ask her how she managed it. "You're certain you got them all?"

The vampire lifted one snow-frosted eyebrow and pointed back along their trail, where the blowing snow had already half-obliterated their footprints. "If anyone's following us, mate, he's a better tracker than I am."

An hour later, the fence intersected an old logging road in a rusty tangle of wire and rotting boards that had once been a gate. On either side of the ruined gate, paired wheel-ruts squiggled off into the pines. No one had driven here for decades. Here and there a few stunted saplings thrust up out of the snow, and a raven circled overhead - Angel couldn't tell if it was the same one. A second raven perched on the top of the ruined gate. It screamed at them and exploded into flight, circling swiftly upwards to join its fellow.

The wind had died down somewhat, and snowflakes fell in lazy arabesques around them, dusting their shoulders with white. By Angel's reckoning they'd traveled about five miles in distance and two thousand feet in elevation from the cabin. Not too shabby, though his knees were starting give him hell.

"Dunno about you, but I'm knackered," Spike said. "Good enough place to rest a bit." He propped a hip against one of the less rickety fenceposts, fetched his tobacco pouch out, and began the intricate process of rolling himself the perfect nicotine delivery system.

Angel crossed his arms and leaned back against a tree-trunk with a white huff of breath. Counting off the seconds till his heartbeat returned to normal, he wondered if Spike was doing the same. He strongly suspected that Spike had called the rest stop mostly for his benefit, but perhaps not. The vampire's limp was barely noticeable now - he must have been serious about having fed recently - but the exposed skin of his face was a bright sunburnt red. Angel didn't think he was going to burst into flame any time soon, but braving even indirect sunlight wasn't without its dangers.

More immediately worrisome were the occasional furtive glances Spike kept throwing at their back-trail, but nothing moved in the monochrome landscape behind them. Angel pulled his cell phone out, flipped it open and consulted the GPS reading.

"Where'd you get that antique?"

Angel scowled at the screen. "It does the job." He hadn't noticed it earlier, but there was a tiny silver stud in Spike's left ear - the external receiver for a bone-conduction cell implant. Spike had always ricocheted between traditionalism and fascination with anything new; he'd once slaughtered an entire family just so he and Drusilla could play with their newly-installed electric lights. "I would have thought you'd be the last guy to want another microchip in his head."

"This one gets the footy scores." Spike flicked his lighter, drew his cigarette to life with a satisfied sigh and made silent offer of a drag. At Angel's curt head-shake he shrugged, settled back against the fence post, and tipped his head back to blow contemplative smoke rings at the overcast sky. A moment later, the sharp scent of whiskey cut through the odors of pine and damp wool as he undid the cap of his flask.

"We follow this road east from here," Angel said. "Four miles in, there's a trailhead leading up to a cave entrance. That's where we'll find our man. He'll have some kind of guardian - the wolves at least, and wards to boot." The screen fuzzed and he gave the phone a shake. "This thing won't be any good for much longer - we're already getting magical interference. Does yours...?"

Spike pursed his lips and scratched the salt-and-pepper stubble coming in along his lean jaw. "Nah. Out of service since last night. I can deal with the guards, but magic on the fly's not my department." He took a swallow and tipped the flask in Angel's direction.

"I can deal with the wards." Angel waved the flask away. "Gave it up."

"So could Willow. In fact, there's been many a time in the last three weeks when I've said to myself, 'Spike, old chap, wouldn't our Will be handy right about now, to magic a way past a few of these clever death-traps?' Or 'Blimey, I'd lay odds Dawn could translate this demon gibberish heaps faster than I can.' Or 'Buggering hell, where's the Slayer when you need her?' But for reasons someone tall, broody and thinning on top refuses to explain, he insists we go it alone, and what do you mean gave it up? What kind of Irishman gives up whiskey?"

"One who's got a sentimental attachment to his liver," Angel snarled. "Damn it, Spike, I told you this was a solo gig from the start! If you can't hack the big time any more, stay home and play Bingo, or whatever the hell it is you do in Sunnydale these days!" He brushed a defensive hand across the top of his head. "And I'm not thinning on top!"

Spike took a startled half-step back, before recalling that Angel could no longer back up the snarl with fangs. His expression turned to mulish obstinance. "Oh, right, and tell Buffy what when your mutilated body makes the six o'clock news? Not a bloody chance. You know what she was doing right before I left? Fretting because she doesn't have an address to send your sodding wedding invitation to!"

"Wedding?" Angel repeated blankly.

Eyeroll. "Connie's. Our eldest girl. Remember? Your boy Lawson's finally convinced her to make an honest vamp of him. 'Bout bloody time, too, she's up the duff again." Spike screwed the lid of the flask back on and interred it in his coat pockets again. "What are we sitting around here for? Miles to go before we sleep and all that."

And he was off, keeping to the shadows of the trees. Angel stood staring after him for a minute, then floundered into a run. "Wait a minute! Lawson? _Sam_ Lawson? I thought he was with the Initiative!"

The sun climbed higher as they hiked, though the cloud cover stayed heavy enough to prevent Spike from singeing. Spike had caught his second wind, and was obviously feeling chatty; he continued to regale Angel with father-of-the-bride stories, general Sunnydale gossip, and accounts of the varied accomplishments of his and Buffy's progeny which Angel couldn't help but feel were slightly embroidered.

Sam Lawson was still with the Initiative, but he'd followed in Spike's incredibly risky footsteps and hunted down a Mohra demon to jump-start his pulse. Fred Burkle had a research fellowship at MIT. Willow Rosenberg was collaborating with her on a paper about quantum magical effects. Rupert Giles had died of a stroke several years ago, after which Faith had cut short her semi-retirement in England and moved back to Boston to start slaying hard and drinking harder, not that Spike was insinuating any connection between the two events, oh no. Xander and Anya Harris had retired last year, sold the contracting business and the Magic Box, and were touring Europe.

Angel listened, at once envious and strangely detached. He'd known these people once, hadn't he? Loved them, hated them - they'd mattered to him, or some of them had. Now it was all like the plot of a soap opera he'd watched a long time ago. Sunnydale 90210. When had he drifted so far away? It had taken more than ten years to travel so far, surely.

"...all Connie wanted was a justice of the peace, but what with never having a proper blow-out herself Buffy talked 'em into a big 'do, and now she's driving the both of 'em barmy with 'suggestions.'" Spike shook his head. "If I get home and find my Constance strangling her mum with something borrowed, I'm blaming you."

"How the hell did we end up like this?" Angel murmured, half to himself.

Spike's smirk had lost none of its bite. "Dunno. But in my case, I'm pretty certain all the shagging had something to do with it."

"No, I mean..." There'd been previous invitations, to birthdays and graduations and weddings and more birthdays and the occasional funeral - he'd lost track of how many, but the Summers-Pratts were a prolific clan. He'd attended a few such occasions, early on, but it was always so awkward. _Hi, I'm Buffy's ex-vampire ex-lover._ Easier to send a card, a cash transfer, a quick text message. Or not to answer at all. "You were always the one chasing after death or glory, and you end up with the white picket fence and the..." He waved one hand to indicate indefinite but alarming quantities of offspring. "I was the one who wanted..."

He'd never dared put a name to what he wanted, but he knew it when he saw it, and he was pretty sure that the last time he'd seen it was in Connor's face, just before the look of stunned betrayal replaced it. The irony was that it was the same thing Connor wanted. Connor was just willing to sacrifice far too much to get it.

Spike snorted. "Oh, put away the tiny violins. You're the one who periodically drops off the face of the earth. Been in touch with the cheerleader lately, or that psychotic little bugger who calls you dear old Dad?"

Ah. Yeah. _There_ was the pain. Knew it had to be around here someplace. Angel grabbed Spike's shoulder and spun him around, slamming him up against the bole of the nearest tree. Funny how bodies remembered what even his relentless memory had let fade, like the precise way that his fingers spanned the column of Spike's throat. It was easy to forget sometimes just how small Spike was, when he packed a six foot eight attitude into a five foot eight frame.

"The last time I saw Connor was the day I tried to slit his throat," Angel said evenly. "I'm not expecting a Father's Day card any time soon. Cordy's in another world now - she made her choice."

"She's in bloody Sacramento! It's barely another zip code!"

"Either way, I don't hear her knocking down my door," Angel snapped. That wasn't precisely true, but it had been years since Cordelia Chase had last used her considerable money and influence to try tracking him down. "Satisfied? You'd better be, because anything else about my personal life is none of your business."

Blue eyes boring into his, so close - how long had it been since anyone had been close? He'd never been into the touchy-feely thing. The backslapping and the hail-fellow-well-met were Spike's deal; Spike had always been as quick with a hug as with a left hook. He should let go. But he didn't. He could smell the stink of tobacco and old blood on Spike's breath, hear the slow inexorable beat of Spike's heart against his chest, a strange new backbeat to a familiar song. Feel Spike's body against his own, strong and solid and strangely warm in contrast to the frigid air.

Muscles tensed beneath his weight, Spike's silent reminder that he was perfectly capable of throwing Angel off. But he didn't. Angel searched those eyes, ready to lash out at any (unforgivable) suggestion of pity, but there was none. Of course not. Spike wasn't capable of it. And they were long past the point when a fist-fight could prove anything, for either of them. Worse luck.

He let his hands drop and stepped back, feeling foolish. "She's doing all right, isn't she? Buffy, I mean."

Spike sucked his cheeks in, tugged his jacket into place, and then nodded, accepting the change of subject. "She is. Little trouble adjusting to the concept of bein' a grandmum, some while back, but we're safely past that." For a second the wintery eyes warmed with something almost like compassion. Almost. With visible effort, Spike added, "Come see her some time. She'd like that."

The necessity of framing a reply to that was mercifully cut short. A savage howl echoed down from the hillside above, and a lupine chorus answered from the opposite ridge. Spike looked up. "Bugger," he muttered. Whirling, he grabbed Angel's shoulders and gave him a little shake. "Angel, get out of here. Climb a tree or something."

"What? Don't be stupid." Angel shook his hands away and unlimbered the Winchester. He checked to make certain that there were cartridges in both chambers and the magazine, and thumbed off the safety. "Get up against that boulder, where they can't circle us. We're up against animals, not demons, and I'm in better shape than you are."

"Like hell you are, and I wouldn't be any too sure of that." Spike, somewhat mysteriously, tugged off his gloves, unzipped his motorcycle jacket and tossed them aside, revealing a black cable-knit sweater beneath. "Just don't want 'em ripped up," he added, at Angel's look. "Oh, balls, never mind, but don't say I didn't warn you."

The wind was rising hard and fast, picking up stinging sheets of snow and whipping them down the mountainside. Branches creaked and snapped overhead. The first wolf howled again, closer now. Backs to the fissured stone, Angel and Spike stood shoulder to shoulder in the heart of gathering storm, eyes fixed upon the fir-covered heights.

Wind and wolves howled together, a mocking chorale. Beside him, Angel heard Spike's answering growl, a low warning rumble. He scanned the wilderness of rocks and trees and blowing snow, but whatever Spike's far-sighted predator's eyes had picked out, it was still invisible to him. Then he saw them. A waterfall of grey shapes, fleeting down the rocky slopes above. Wolves, bounding from ledge to ledge, parting and merging again in a ravening cascade of fur and fang, muscle and bone. Servants of the frost giants - or the descendants of a pack released in Yosemite in the '20s, as the newsblogs claimed, driven south by the anomalous winter, hungry and desperate enough to risk an encounter with Man. _Keep your pets inside._

Angel raised the shotgun, braced the stock against his shoulder. No fancy stuff. Body shots. This had been Wesley's favorite weapon. There was irony for you. He sighted, aimed. Waited.

Fired.

The shotgun roared and leaped against his shoulder as he hit the lead wolf with both barrels. The leader of the pack spun into the air and fell to earth in a crimson winding-sheet of blood. Its comrades coursed over its body without hesitation. Angel jacked another cartridge into the chamber and aimed again. The wind rose to a scream as he got the second shot off. A second wolf yipped and went into a splayfooted roll, splattering the snow a cherry-snowcone red in its wake. For a second Angel could have sworn that the wound bled blue flame. And then the pack was upon them.

"Come to Daddy!" Spike sang, spinning into a kick that staved in a furry ribcage. Heedless of the snapping fangs, he grabbed the beast's muzzle and twisted. Bones crunched and muscle tore, and Spike pitched the carcass nose over tail at the next wolf like the fast bowler he'd been in another lifetime.

Angel squinted into the whirling snow, praying to whatever would listen for a clear shot. The urge to jump into the fight was nigh-irresistible, but he'd given in to that urge often enough when he was younger to have learned the hard way how stupid it was. He braced his shoulders against the lichenous rock, waiting another opportunity to pick off another wolf without hitting Spike. There. The shotgun roared again, and another wolf went down.

Two more heaps of bloodsoaked fur lay at Spike's feet. Any normal wolf-pack would have retreated by now, but their attackers pressed closer. They danced in and out again, a semi-circle of savage jaws, striking one, two, or three at a time, and then darting away. If Spike connected, a wolf died, and they knew it. But Spike's reflexes, though still far swifter than any human's, had lost a few crucial fractions of a second over the years. Every now and again, a wolf would get past his guard. Not all of the blood on the snow was theirs. Sooner or later - probably sooner - Spike would falter. And then Spike would go down.

Unless Angel blew them all to kingdom come first.

Sight. Aim. Fire. Five down. Spike snapped the spine of a huge black-furred wolf across his knee. Six. Angel blasted a seventh wolf just before it sank its teeth into Spike's still-healing leg. More howls rang along the ridge-tops. Reload. They could do this. Might take a little longer than it used to - and there was the rub. It was closing up on noon, but going by the featureless sky it could have been dawn or twilight. They might win this battle, but all the wolves had to do to win the war was delay them long enough.

"We've got to get out of here!" Angel yelled. "We can't afford to waste time on this!"

Spike doubled over and braced his hands against his knees. He was panting hard. His cap had fallen off and his hair was a riot of sandy-grey curls, matted with frozen sweat and blood. "Doing my best here," he gasped.

"Then do better," Angel snapped. "Tubby!"

"Says the bloke who was checking out my arse just now." Spike straightened. "Oh, bloody hell."

Angel followed his gaze. Up the slope where it had first fallen, the lead wolf's coat shimmered from grey to white. It staggered to its feet, black tongue lolling, its eyes blazing blue. It threw back its head, howled like the damned, and raced down the slope, blue flame frothing at its jaws. Hellishly fast, preternaturally strong, the ghost-wolf leaped into the air and soared over the heads of its living packmates to bury its fangs in Spike's throat. At the last moment Spike twisted and the icicle teeth met in the muscle of his shoulder.

Angel fired off the remaining barrel of the shotgun as the ghost-wolf's weight bowled Spike over, and spun the gun around to club the nearest wolf on the skull with the stock. He dropped the shotgun, whipped his Bowie knife out of its belt sheath, and buried the blade between the ghost wolf's heaving shoulders.

Flame spurted from the wound, blue as gaslight and cold as dry ice. The wolf dropped Spike with a howl of rage. Before Angel could prise the blade free or drive it deeper, the wolf spun, jerking the knife out of his grasp, and lunged for his throat. Angel rammed his left forearm into the beast's maw and flailed around the furry bulk of its body for the handle of his knife. If he could just catch hold - there! Gripping the knife handle, he wrenched with all his strength, carving a deep gouge in the ghost-wolf's side. The wound closed behind the blade instantly.

There was an inhuman roar, and out of the corner of his eye Angel saw a horrific vision surging up from under a snarling, writhing heap of wolf-flesh. Vampire, but _worse_. Scimitar fangs lined a leonine muzzle, feral eyes flared sulfur-yellow beneath ridged brows studded with stubby horns. The coarse grey mane sprouting along the crown of its skull gave way to glossy grey-green scales and Jesus Christ, it was Spike.

Demon-Spike caught the ghost-wolf round the throat, inch-long claws penetrating the thick ruff and digging deep into icy, translucent flesh. With a savagery to match its own he tore into its jugular. Bone crunched and hide ripped, and the ghost-wolf shredded like a badly-made pinata, dissolving into a flurry of snow.

All around them, the bodies of the fallen wolves were shimmering, changing, rising. Spike spat out a gobbet of disintegrating blue-white fur and whirled to face the remaining wolves, roaring again in challenge. The ghost-pack howled as one, and jumped him.

Angel felt his pockets for the box of shells and looked around for the shotgun - there, over by the rock face. Now, while the wolves were momentarily occupied with Spike. He scrambled to hands and knees and lunged for the barrel of the gun, belly-sliding across the last few feet of bloodstained ice. His fingers were clumsy in their Snopro gloves; he fumbled badly breaking the shotgun open and dropped half the shells into the snow. Cursing, he scooped up the cold brass cylinders and rammed them into the magazine.

The next fifteen minutes were a blur of blood and snow. Angel shot wolves, and Spike tore their ghosts to shreds. Eight down, four rising. Nine down, six rising. On and on it went, until the last two living wolves took stock of their situation and broke off, loping away into the concealing storm.

Spike swung around to stare at him. He was bleeding from a dozen bites and gashes, and his sides were heaving like a bellows. Angel held his breath, knuckles whitening on the trigger. How deep did the change go, and to what extent was Spike's demon aspect in control now? He had one shell in the left chamber and two more shells in the magazine before he'd have to reload again, and he hoped that was enough to stop... whatever the hell Spike was now. Spike rasped something Angel couldn't catch, his voice gravelly and distorted by the altered bone structure of his jaws. He dropped to his knees, then to all fours. His golden eyes rolled up in his shaggy, monstrous head and he collapsed face-first in the snow.

Angel climbed stiffly to his feet and staggered over to the fallen vampire. When he turned Spike's limp body over, the fine-boned features were entirely human again. "Knew there was something about those wolves I forgot to mention," Spike whispered. "Gotta kill 'em twice."

"Yeah," Angel gasped. "Figured that part out."

****

Hiking up a mountain in a blizzard wasn't something a man of sixty-eight did on a whim, regardless of how religiously he worked out every day. However, it was a stroll in the park compared to hiking up a mountain in a blizzard with a hundred and eighty pounds of unconscious vampire slung over your shoulders. By the time the trailhead came into sight, Angel was starting to see spots. Buffy had told him years ago that Spike only really needed to inhale about once every half-hour or so. He hoped she was right.

Worse, he was convinced now that there was someone following them. He could feel eyes on him - familiar eyes. Their quarry, watching them through some scrying spell? Ravens? Bigfoot? No way of telling.

As they reached the top of the rise, Spike spasmed in his grip and went into a fit of racking coughs. "Put me down before you stroke out, old man," he wheezed after a moment. "I can walk."

"About goddamned time you woke up."

"Been awake for the last quarter-mile. Just wanted to see how long you'd carry me."

Angel dumped Spike promptly and ungently to the ground, and tossed his jacket on top of him. Spike lay on the snowy pine needles for a moment, squinting up at the dirty grey sky. He rolled over, pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, and stood swaying a little. The red blaze of sunburn across his nose and cheeks was starting to swell into ugly, oozing blisters. "Don't feel so good," he said, and sat abruptly back down.

Crap. Spike was in shock. Vampires weren't supposed to go into shock, damn it. What the hell did you do for people in shock? Keep them warm? How warm? Spike had a body temperature, but Angel couldn't remember what it was, just that it was lower than human norm.

He hauled Spike to his feet. Spike followed him without protest. Spike doing anything without protest was a bad sign. "Did you lose my hat?" Spike inquired. "If you lost my hat, I'm going to be brassed off. Lucky hat, that was. Alex gave it to me. Sweet kid, Alex. Dunno where he gets it from."

The ramada at the trailhead was a Spartan affair, three walls and a roof of rough-hewn logs, with a fire pit and an ancient cement picnic bench underneath. Angel had no idea how the bench had come to be there, unless some long-forgotten logging company had hauled it in, fifty, sixty, a hundred years ago. The first time he'd seen it, it had reminded him uneasily of the Stone Table; he could close his eyes and hear Spike's whiskey-and-molasses voice reading _The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe_ to Drusilla, and changing the ending for her so that Jadis ruled over a winter kingdom of statues, forever and ever and ever.

Except that had never happened - or if it had, he hadn't been there to witness it.

Angel plunked Spike down at the table and ran his hands up and down Spike's ribs, checking for damage. The bleeding had stopped, but under the shredded sweater and t-shirt, the pale, solidly-muscled torso was cris-crossed with bites and scratches. Most would heal within hours, but at least three of the wounds were more serious: that first bite which had laid Spike's left shoulder open all the way to the bone, a deep gash in his right side, and another bite to the right calf that had half hamstrung him - the same leg he'd hurt the previous night.

"...and any plan where you lose your hat," Spike assured him earnestly, "is a bad plan." He was starting to shiver violently.

Damn it. No single injury was life-threatening, and all of the wounds were starting to heal, and - and _that_ was the problem. Spike's hybrid metabolism was expending all its energy on stitching his internal organs back together, instead of attending to such trivial details as maintaining a core temperature of seventy-two point six, or whatever the hell it was supposed to be. And the ongoing second-degree burns couldn't be helping. Under the circumstances, it was probably a damn good thing Spike was carrying a few extra pounds; he needed all the insulation he could get.

The cliche at this point would be to strip and try to warm him up with body contact, but with no sleeping bag to conserve body heat, Angel was fairly certain that would just result in two cases of hypothermia instead of one. He glanced up at the lowering clouds. Could he risk building a fire? They were too close to the cave, and heaven knew what was up there, watching. And the hard truth was, there just wasn't time. It was already past noon, and they had to make the cave before sundown.

Or no. _He_ had to make the cave before sundown. A treacherous worm of a thought crept up from the depths: Spike had served his purpose: he'd disposed of the physical obstacles stationed between Angel and his goal. From this point on, Spike could only slow him down. He could just wrap him up, leave him here, and hope for the best. Spike was tough. He'd probably pull through. And if he didn't... well, he'd go down a hero, helping to save the world one more time. Not a bad death for a monster. Spike himself couldn't ask for a better exit. Maybe it was for the best.

Buffy wouldn't even have to know.

With a curse, Angel shucked his coat and peeled back his sleeve to bare his wrist for the one sure-fire method of warming up a vampire he knew. The ghost-wolf's teeth hadn't quite had time to pierce the layers of shearling merino coat, wool overshirt, and flannel undershirt: his arm was blotched with darkening bruises, but the skin was unbroken. He drew his knife.

Spike's pupils dilated as the first red drops pearled up around the blade. He fanged out instantly, clamping onto Angel's arm with terrifying strength and sucking hard.

It hurt like hell, like nothing since the white-hot needles of Darla's fangs in his throat so very long ago - threads of molten gold running along his veins, through his heart and straight to his groin. Pain as the burning heart of a cold, cold world. He never wanted it to stop.

Spike was nuzzling his wrist, making little purring snarls and grunts of pleasure. But he wasn't biting down nearly as hard as he could have, only just enough to keep the blood flowing without causing major tissue damage with his fangs. He must have done this before with someone comparatively human and vulnerable. Which meant he knew how to stop - at least, in theory, when his meager supply of brain cells wasn't in deep freeze.

Angel grit his teeth (it really, _really_ hurt now) and put every ounce of command he possessed into, "Spike! Let go!"

Spike growled and kept feeding. Some distant analytical portion of Angel's mind noted he was starting to get dizzy. And wondered how the hell he could be getting a hard-on when his blood was so busy elsewhere. "Spike. That's enough." He didn't know what made him add, "Please."

Feral eyes blinked yellow and opened a startled blue. The scales and horns melted away, and Spike's fangs receded right out of Angel's arm. Freaky. Spike looked at Angel, looked around at the walls of the lean-to, and licked his lips. "Fuck," he said at last, with great feeling.

Angel hacked a strip off the hem of Spike's t-shirt (what the hell, it was ruined anyway) with his knife and wrapped it around his forearm to stop the bleeding. "How long has _that_ been going on?" he demanded.

"Don't remember exactly." Spike doubled over in another coughing fit. "Just came on gradual-like over the years - demon version of going grey, I expect. Don't get quite as grr-argh as in Pylea, but I don't like to risk it when Buffy's not around. I've been known to get excitable." He straightened up and grinned, tongue-tip caught between his teeth. "Good luck for me the Slayer's got a thing for leather, yeh?"

He rolled cautiously off the table and did a few stretches, hissing a little as his game leg took his weight. Angel unwrapped the protein bars he'd brought along and...well, there was no other word for it - wolfed them down. Aside from the familiar aches and pains that came with getting up in the mornings these days, and a rapidly subsiding erection, he was doing all right, though he didn't think his left arm would be much good if it came to more fighting. Spike had done him more damage than the wolf had. But it wasn't like he'd ever planned on fighting Skoll single handed.

He looked up. Spike was hunched over on the bench, rolling himself another cigarette. Angel wadded up the wrapper from his protein bar and stuck it in his pocket. "Put that out," he said irritably. "You've already coughed up one lung."

Spike rolled his eyes with the same expertise as he rolled his smokes. "Yes, Mother. You ready to go yet? I thought we were on a timetable."

With a growl of his own, Angel rose and started up the trail at a pace he knew Spike couldn't keep up long, coat flapping behind him. Not because he was pissed off. They just needed to make up lost time. "I don't know why Buffy still lets you smoke the damned things," he muttered under his breath.

"Gave up killing people," Spike yelled after him. Score one for vampire hearing. "Bloke's gotta have some fun in life!" He broke into a limping trot to catch up, and, a bit breathless, went on, "So what's a hot Saturday night like for you these days, Liam? Hour of tai chi, hearty meal of macrobiotic rice and mineral water, inventory your remaining follicles and toddle off to bed at eight-thirty to conserve your precious bodily fluids?"

Angel forcibly restrained himself from poking at his hair. He was _not..._ OK, receding a little at the temples, maybe, but - "Better than pretending I'm still twenty-six and invulnerable."

"Rather burn my candle at both ends than sit in the dark. I spent my first closing-on-thirty years writing shitty poems to women I couldn't shag and wondering if I dared to eat a bloody peach. You think I wanted to live _that_ life over again?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you smoke and drink and eat like there's no tomorrow. Bully for you. Well, tomorrow's here and what have you got to show for it?"

"Lungs like a tar pit, a liver you could slice up for pickle, and a somewhat less than girlish figure," Spike replied promptly. "And I've loved every sodding minute of it. Can you say the same?"

Angel slowed - not because Spike's hitching, determined limp was painful to watch, but because... because. "All I have to do is get the job done. I don't have to love doing it."

Spike rubbed his nose, scraping off a long peeling strip of sunburnt skin. "Yeh, about that... I'm assuming you've got a clever plan. Care to fill me in?"

Head down, Angel trudged along for a few more steps in silence. "According to the Eddas, Skoll is the spawn of Fenrir, the greatest of the monster wolves born to Loki and the giantess Angrboda. Each day he chases the chariot of Sol across the heavens, trying to pull down its horses and devour her."

"Like to see the orbital mechanics of that."

"It's a metaphor. You're the poet. Deal with it." What did it say about his life that when he needed to make a call, the only person he knew for a rock-solid certainty would pick up the phone was Spike? He'd had friends once, real friends. Loyal companions. Doyle, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred, Lorne... One by one he'd misplaced them. You couldn't say lost, exactly; he knew where each and every one had gone. Here at the end of things only Spike was left, stubbornly limping along at his side. "Under the right conditions, the disc you brought me can be used to summon an... an adversary. An entity that can fight Skoll on its own terms."

"Summoned how?" Spike asked. "It's been my experience that god-class entities don't show up for a 'pretty please.' We expecting the miraculous appearance of a ram, or should I be worried?"

"Don't tempt me. I've got it covered."

The skeptical look Spike gave him wasn't enough to induce him to elaborate. "The important thing is, right now, you're a liability. You're not going to heal in time to be any use in another fight. You couldn't be part of the summoning ritual if you wanted to - you're a demon. And - "

Spike pointed upwards, to the black specks riding the storm above. "And I should go home, put my feet up, and set a spell. How far d'you think I'd get alone? Or you?"

"You'd get as far as you wanted to," Angel said bluntly. "The minute you turn around, you're not important any longer."

The moment the words left his mouth he wanted to snatch them back and swallow them - the muscles in Spike's jaw clenched, and the bloody-minded look in his eye hearkened back to a thousand fruitless arguments over a hundred vanished years. Spike shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and headed into the wind.

They climbed through massive stands of white pine and mountain hemlock. The trail wound upwards between great stony ribs of granite, blown bare of snow by the wind. Around the bases of the rocks the frozen stems of lupine and globeflower, Indian paintbrush and mountain columbine rattled together, icy revenants of a truncated summer. Above and ahead of them, a great dome of rock shouldered its way free of the mountain, rising sheer and white from a scree of sloughed stone. Ravens wheeled overhead, crying out with the voices of dead men. The faint smudge of light that was the sun was slipping down the sky behind them now.

Angel would have said that time had lost all meaning, but he had a watch. 3:36 PM. Twenty-five miles a day on flat ground was very respectable time; they'd come almost half that distance today, with another mile to go. They had maybe an hour to reach the cave, if they were lucky. If he could raise one frozen foot and place it ahead of the other, one more time.

"You pillock," Spike panted, as if he'd just figured it out. "Even if we get there, we'll never get down again today. You won't last the night out here."

"I told you to go home."

"Nah. I've had a brilliant idea. I can eat you, hole up, have a nice nap, and be home by tomorrow night."

Angel didn't bother to respond; Spike seemed to thrive on squabbling, but it just made him tired, and he was exhausted enough already. The mountain was throwing everything it had at them now, snow and sleet lashing down on wind strong enough to hold him up if he leaned into it. The world narrowed to a blind white tunnel of rock and snow, and there was only cold, and wind, and one more step to take.

Spike had pulled ahead of him again, limp and all, because he was a fucking demon, with a fucking demon's strength and stamina, and it was all so damn _unfair._ Somehow or other they were holding hands, and Spike was dragging him up the mountain by force, spitting and snarling like a cranky old tomcat - "'Go home' my lily-white arse, you colossal self-absorbed git, God in heaven how I hate you - " Not at all like that time in St. Petersburg.

The roar of the storm cut off, and Angel almost collapsed from the weight of the huge ringing silence. Or not quite silence. He could still hear the wind, but muffled now. He stumbled and fell forward, landing on something not nearly as soft as he could have hoped for.

The something croaked, "Gerroff, you bloody great ox!"

Oh. Spike.

Angel rolled over and checked his watch. 4:01 PM. Still time. They were twenty feet in from the mouth of the cave, lying on an uneven, rocky floor. Overhead was darkness; outside was a swirling wall of snow. Spike lay a few feet away, an ice-crusted, fetal curl of limbs. His eyes were scrunched shut, and beneath the raw oozing mask of sunburn, his face was drawn - almost as grey as the stone, and just about as still. He looked dead, but Angel had been fooled once by that not-breathing thing and he wasn't going to fall for it again. Besides, if you looked close, his lips were moving: _...rip your liver out and feed it to you, you bleeding suicidal arsewipe..._ Spike complained, therefore he was.

He thought about standing up, but it seemed like too much trouble. On hands and knees he made his way across the cavern floor, feeling cautiously ahead of him in the dim light. His hands and feet in their high-tech boots and gloves were blocks of ice, too numb to feel the pain when his knuckles collided with rocks. Behind him he heard Spike grunt and sit up. Somewhere along here...if he thought he could manage to work the lighter without dropping it...

Spike staggered to his feet, squinting at him. "What the hell?"

Angel hauled a first aid kit out of the crevice, along with a flashlight and a package of RCWs. "Our guy camps out up here," he said. "Stands to reason he'd have emergency supplies laid in. Eat fast. He'll be starting the ritual right about now."

A frown line cut between Spike's brows, but as Angel had hoped, he seemed to be too tired to make an issue of it. He caught the packaged meal Angel tossed him, though he seemed more interested in warming his hands on the chemical heatpack than anything else - it was doubtful that his body could wrest any nourishment out of something this far removed from living blood, but at least it would keep him quiet.

"I could sleep for a week and then some. Christ, this is revolting," Spike mumbled through a mouthful of freeze-dried reconstituted hamburger.

Or not. Angel tore the corner off his own meal pack with his teeth. Spike rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck and froze, nostrils distended.

"When were you planning on telling me this bloke was a vampire?"

Damn. He'd been hoping to put that particular revelation off a little longer. "I didn't think I'd have to, once you smelled him."

Spike scowled and picked bits of leathery zucchini out of his dinner - he had no truck with vegetables unless they came breaded and fried. "I take it stealth's not our watchword."

"He knows we're here." Angel choked down the last tasteless bite of rations and tucked the flashlight under his arm. "He's just counting on us being too late to do anything. "

In the Sierra Nevadas there were caves of breathtaking beauty, subterranean palaces festooned with curtains and colonnades of limestone, their roofs encrusted with delicate fretworks of calcite. This cave wasn't one of them. It snaked back into the heart of the mountain, a long, dry, rubble-choked knife-wound in the stone. The faint glow of torchlight glimmered in the distance.

They went as quickly as cold-numbed and leaden limbs could carry them, spidering from boulder to boulder in the darkness. The passageway was illumined every twenty or thirty feet by little clusters of candle lamps set in niches in the stone. Angel's hands and feet were starting to burn and tingle as life crept back into them. He wished they wouldn't; it was a distraction.

Ahead of him, Spike pulled himself over the crest of the current boulder and crouched atop it with a murmured, "_Shit._" Pebbles scraped beneath the soles of his boots, rattled and bounced down into eternity, clack, clack, clack. Angel hauled himself up beside him, puffing. The stone sloped downwards and dropped into nothingness. The passage they were following continued across the abyss. Angel shone the flashlight downwards; the mountain swallowed the beam of light whole. Driven into the stone were a pair of sturdy steel eyebolts, such as might once have been the attachments for a rope bridge. Such as the one coiled up on the other side of the pit.

Spike eyed the gap between the slab of rock they clung to and the next; that same cranky old tomcat, gauging the distance of a leap that in better days he could have made without thought. A good fifteen feet, and no flat ground to get a running start. Child's play for a vampire in his prime.

"Right, then," said Spike, and before Angel could move he'd risen to his feet and was racing down the slope of the stone, letting gravity lend him the momentum he couldn't build up on his own. At the very point where the stone dropped away he kicked off and soared across the gap, arms spread wide, legs windmilling in space - Lupin III on the rooftops of Castle Cagliostro. The toe of his right boot touched the ledge on the opposite side and for an instant Spike hung suspended in space, clawing thin air as if to pull himself to safety by sheer force of will. Then his half-healed leg gave way under him, the treads of his boot slipped, and he was falling. He vamped out in mid-air and grabbed for the ledge, claws shearing through the fingers of his gloves.

Angel lunged forward, felt himself start to slide, and leaned back against the sloping rock, feet braced against the steel anchors. He felt strangely clear-headed, and also as if his chest were about to burst. Dancing on the head of a pin. Balanced precariously on the anchor bolts, he unbuckled his belt, fast as his shaking hands could move. In the back of his mind he added _fifty-foot rope_ to his list of essential adventuring gear.

Spike kicked wildly against the sheer cliff. His massive rear claws split the leather uppers of his boots and dug into the rock. Angel coiled his belt into a ball and flung it across the chasm with all the strength still in him. "Pull the bridge down!" The belt smacked against the stone by Spike's ear, and Spike snapped it out of the air, fangs closing on the leather before it could fall.

Weight on his feet now, Spike transferred the belt from muzzle to hand, gripping it clumsily. He flicked it up over the lip of the cliff; the buckle knocked against the boards of the rolled-up bridge and slid off. Growling something that could have been curses or prayers, Spike swung the belt again. His claws gouged white scratches in the granite, slipping, slipping the while. The buckle caught, Spike jerked hard, and the bridge unrolled with a clatter, rapping him on the head as it came down. Human once more, he caught hold of the wooden crossbars, and swarmed up the dangling bridge to safety.

Angel released his breath, hardly aware that he'd been holding it. "Are you just going to sit there?" he shouted. Spike bared his teeth and began to haul the bridge up. There were weighted ropes attached to the opposite end; Spike swung one across the crevice bolo-fashion. Angel caught it and pulled the bridge taut. Steel hooks at the end of the wooden crossties fit into the anchor bolts.

The bridge creaked under his weight when Angel stepped out on it and he felt a stab of trepidation; he had a good thirty pounds on Spike. He took another step. Don't look down, that was the key. Another step, another; slow but steady, and hope Spike couldn't smell his palms sweating. He took the last few steps in a rush and Spike grabbed his hand hard enough to bruise and pulled him up. Angel gripped back - afraid Spike would drop him. Or something. They were both shaking.

"Took you long enough."

Spike shrugged. "Yeh, well... never did get the knack of that cockroach-on-a-wall trick."

The last length of tunnel was claustrophobically narrow; Angel had to take off his pack and the shotgun holster, and edge along sideways to squeeze through. Behind him Spike sniffed the air suspiciously. There was no way he couldn't know what awaited them now. Maybe it would have been better to tell him the whole story from the beginning. But the more Spike knew, the greater the chances would be of him insisting upon telling Buffy everything - or worse, running off on his own mission of half-cocked vengeance.

"Angel."

He'd figured it out. And was going to start arguing. "What?"

But Spike sounded more contemplative than combative. "You remember when you told me what Darla said about what happens to us vamps? When we dust, I mean?"

Angel pressed his forehead to the stone. "I remember." So long ago, now. But Darla's voice on the telephone still spoke across the years, breathy, dreamy, desperate. Talking of her own death. _It's a great big nothing. Could it be there is no hell?_ "Don't worry. You won't dust. You'll rot."

"Point is, when I go," Spike continued, as if the walls were pressing the words out of him by force, "I'm gone. To hell, or oblivion. Buffy told me...the first time she died and went to... where she'll be going, she was alone. S'not right, being alone in - in that place. So I want you to promise. Look in on her for me. When you get where she's going."

He wasn't, Angel realized, talking about dropping by with a casserole after the funeral. How often had he fantasized Spike's death - about being the one to kill him? At one point he'd practically drawn up blueprints. "What makes you think I won't be in a better position to look in on you? Besides, you're going to eat me and be home by tomorrow, remember?"

"Got your shanshu, yeh?" Spike's pupils flashed red in the feeble glow of the flashlight. "Comes with a get-out-of-sin-free ticket, last I heard."

Angel would have laughed, if he'd had room to take a breath. "What shanshu? Buffy ran me through with a sword coated in Mohra blood. It wasn't destiny, or prophecy, or any kind of reward. It was the Slayer doing her job."

Spike snorted. "For a bloke who bends over so's Fate can peg his arse, you're awfully particular about the lube the bitch uses. Just promise." He shot Angel a sideways scowl. "But no funny stuff, or I'll bloody come back and haunt the both of you."

"Fine, I - " Angel cut himself off. "Shh. We're almost there."

Ahead of them the fissure widened, fanning out into a cavern a hundred yards across. Its walls rose to impossible heights overhead, and from those lofty heights bars of faint silver light filtered down from some crevice higher on the mountainside, to reflect from still, shallow ice-rimmed pools gathered on the cavern floor. Shadows leaped back and forth between oil lamps mounted upon the walls - and on those walls, incised deep into the grey stone, marched rank upon rank of runes. The austere lines and angles of the Greater Futhark flickered and shifted in the lamplight, as though the story they told had not yet settled upon an ending.

In the center of the cavern a barrow-mound rose twenty feet above the cavern floor, its sloping sides paneled with great slabs of polished granite. More runes ran along the stones, circling endlessly back upon themselves, alongside the repeating figure of a nine-branched tree. Atop the barrow, a cloaked and hooded figure sat cross-legged, hands folded and head bowed. A rhythmic chant echoed through the chamber.

Angel broke into a stumbling run, and shouted, "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce!"

The chant cut short. The cowled figure's head jerked up and back, and the hood fell away. Wesley's eyes gazed at nothingness, and his mouth gaped wide in a yawn, a gasp, a terrible scrape of breath into lungs that no longer welcomed the air. For a moment he sat as if dazed, long enough for Angel to reach the foot of the barrow, and then he straightened.

"Angel," he said. "I've been expecting you. But you're four minutes too late." He pointed upward, as if he could see through the fathoms of stone overhead. "It's already begun."

4:20 P.M., August 12, 2045. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, the sun was beginning to occlude.

"Pryce," Spike breathed. In his eyes yellow sparks flared and died and flared again, and it wasn't cold he was shaking with now. "So it is you, after all. Thought my nose was playing tricks on me."

Wesley leaped down from the barrow, swift and strong and terrible. In the shadows he might have been the same man who'd knocked on the door of Angel Investigations, so many years ago, but as he came closer, Angel could see how haggard he'd grown. Remorse could be a crueler master than time. Under the long grey folds of the cloak he was wearing quite prosaic hiking boots, blue jeans and plaid flannel, and only the flash of night-sighted pupils, red as Spike's in the lamplight, said _vampire_.

"Spike," he said. "I regret that you had to get caught up in this."

Spike's hands flexed into fists. "You've still got it," he said. "Your soul. I can smell it on you."

"I imagine you can," Wesley replied with a nervy grimace. "Willow was very thorough in restoring it. I can't possibly thank her enough."

"So why're you here, then?" Spike demanded. "Thought you an' Cordelia gave up the supernatural gig to save the whales an' cure world hunger."

"The last Pacific grey died off the California coast twelve years ago." Wesley strode over to a small chest at the edge of the nearest pool and undid the clasp of his cloak. Laying it carefully aside, he knelt and opened the chest, lifting out a great, lustrous black wolf's pelt, complete with head and paws. "World hunger, I regret to say, continues unassuaged in the wake of incursions by the latest mosaic virus. Cordelia still believes she can do the most good within the system. I do not."

Wesley rose to his feet and shook the pelt out, seven feet and more from the tip of its snarling muzzle to the base of its brushy tail. He vamped out and swept the pelt around his shoulders, forepaws tied across his chest, so that the great head lolled next to his. Its bared fangs and glassy yellow eyes were a reflection of his own. "I'd hoped that perhaps Angel had seen reason and come back to help rather than hinder. Or hasn't he told you that he was my ally before he was my enemy?"

"Until I found out exactly what you meant by reducing global temperatures," Angel gritted out. "And I'm not your enemy, damn it. I could have come blazing in here with Willow and half a dozen Slayers and the National Guard. But I didn't. You have to realize by now that this is out of control. Nature magic and the undead don't mix. If Willow taught us anything - "

"Willow is hardly infallible." Wesley's features melted into human lines once more. "Control is not the point, Angel. 'The vampire with a soul, having fulfilled his destiny, will shanshu.' I studied the Scroll of Aberjian for years, trying to decipher the nuances of the prophecy and determine which souled vampire it applied to. I've finally realized the truth."

Angel stared at him, stunned. "Wesley. No." He clasped the taller man's shoulder. His own craggy face reflected in the pool - dark fierce eyes, shock of silver hair. But where his old friend should have been was nothingness. Only his own hand, resting on thin air. "Wes, listen. Maybe the shanshu is yours. But not this way! This isn't destiny. It's madness. Thousands - hell, millions - of people are going to die, and for what? You can still stop this. The eclipse is still moving. Totality won't hit us until - "

Wesley's fist smashed into his face, slamming Angel back against the barrow. Stone clubbed the air from his lungs, and a second later cracked sharply across the back of his head. Dark, flame-rimmed blobs crawled before his eyes, throbbing in time with the pain in his jaw. A hand locked around his throat and hauled him upright.

"If this is madness," Wesley asked, "who drove me to it?" His fingers dug into Angel's throat, but his eyes were on Spike, who'd gone fangy and was tensed to spring. Once Spike might have been fast enough to take Wesley down before the younger vampire snapped Angel's neck, but now... "This isn't destiny? It has to be. It must be." His voice was perfectly calm and reasonable, steady as stone. "You'd rob me of the chance to atone, merely because you lost your own chance at redemption?"

Spike prowled in circles around them. He was still limping, and favoring his wounded shoulder. His tawny eyes flicked from Angel to Wesley and back again. Angel caught his gaze and mouthed, _Distract him._

Ridged brows knit in a gargoyle scowl, Spike came to a halt and eyed Wesley with a mix of wariness and insolence. He hooked a thumb in his belt and gave his jeans an irritable hitch - they didn't fit his demon-shape very well. "Atone?" he rasped in a barely-understandable growl.

"Anyone who's studied the sagas can tell you that Ragnarok is merely the end of one cycle of being and the beginning of another." Wesley's eyes glittered with conviction. "The final winter will yield to a new spring. Certainly there will be death and suffering. But out of that suffering the world will be reborn, and I shall be reborn with it. Free of sin. Free of - do you have any conception of the evil I did in the years I ran Wolfram &amp; Hart and headed the Circle of the Black Thorn? Either of you?" He laughed bitterly. "Angelus and William the Bloody, the most feared vampires in Europe. A family devastated here, a nunnery slaughtered there." He gazed down into the icy water at his feet, pulling the wolfskin closer about his shoulders. "You were _amateurs._"

All around them, the shafts of sunlight from above greyed, dimmed, and winked out. Inch by stealthy inch, Angel slipped a hand into his coat pocket. The sun-disc was a burning golden weight in his fingers. He eased his hand out of its glove, ran his thumb across the incised symbols on the disk.

"Drugs. Weapons trafficking. Slave trade." The tremor in Wesley's voice was barely detectable. "Stifling technologies. Steering governments. Massive advertising campaigns, designed to encourage the worst of mankind's impulses. We weren't simply in the business of making money. We were in the business of building Hell on Earth. And I was its master architect." He drew a breath that was almost a sob. "And then you gave me back my soul. It would have been kinder to stake me."

"Great for the ego, isn't it?" Angel wheezed. His lungs were still afire in his chest. "Telling yourself you're the single-handed author of the world's misery. What else qualifies you to save it?"

"I could blame you." Wesley gave Angel a shake. "It was you who made me a monster, after all. _Sire._ But I chose to do as you did, and fight against the very evil I'd constructed. I only follow in your footsteps. I'm sorry that you can't see that." He looked up. A single ray of sunlight remained, a spear of fire lancing down through the darkness. "It's time. For twenty years the world burned, and I stoked the flames. Today I'm going to quench them."

He tossed Angel aside, almost contemptuously. Angel clenched his teeth on a scream as his shoulder hit the stone floor. With one long stride Wesley was standing in the last ray of sunlight. Blue flame blossomed along his outspread fingers and licked up his arms to his shoulders.

"You're wrong, Wes." Angel dragged the sun-disk free of his pocket. "I figured it out. Took me forty years, but being human's taught me a few things. Mainly that we don't need a demon law firm to screw us up. We manage that just fine on our own." He rolled to his knees, every joint aching, and clasped the disc in his lap. "Holland Manners was right. Hell's right here on Earth, yeah. But you know what? So's Heaven. We make them. Both of them. Every day."

But Wesley was beyond listening. He spread his arms wide and threw his head back, mouth open in a soundless scream. A fountain of blue flame leaped skywards, breaking on the rocky ceiling and falling in a rain of silver-blue sparks. The sparks hung on the still air, limning a great shape in the darkness - a wolf made of midnight. It shook itself, shedding comets. Its eyes were great pinwheel galaxies; its gullet was a black hole.

Skoll crouched to spring upwards.

Spike, human again, was pulling him up. Angel struggled to his feet, clutching the sun�"disc, and flashed Spike a tight grin. "Keep him occupied. You said it'd been too long since you had a proper scrap."

"Rethinking that as we speak." Spike rolled his shoulders, cupped his hands and roared, "Oi, Rover! Come and get me!" He reached down and ripped his ruined boots off one by one, salvaging his knives. "I sodding well hope that oojah - " he nodded at the disc, " - was worth the price."

Angel turned away. _We haven't finished paying for it yet._

The limestone slabs lining the barrow-mound had been set within a knife's edge of one another once, but frost heaves and earthquakes of years past had jostled them from their age-old resting places. There were cracks between them large enough to wedge in a hand, or the toe of a boot. Angel yanked his gloves off, clenched the disk in his teeth and began to climb. The totality of an eclipse lasted seven minutes at most. They had that long to keep that monster from devouring the sun.

Cold air sandpapered his throat. His muscles felt watery, trembling with exhaustion. Blood was starting to seep through the makeshift bandage on his arm, staining the sleeve of his coat. He reached for the next hand-hold, but his twice-bitten arm refused to hold his weight, and he slid back to the knife-thin ledge. His fingers left red smears against the stone. Angel pressed close to the rock face, hard enough that the carven runes imprinted on his cheek. _I'm going to fall._ It was as inevitable as his next breath.

He heard a whoop, and then a yelp that set the stones ringing again, but there was no time or energy to waste on what was happening to Spike - the best he could hope for was that Spike managed to distract Skoll for a moment or two before Skoll crushed Spike flat. With a gasp he forced himself upwards again.

An intricate pavement of slate covered the summit of the barrow-mound, its patterns lost to time, and at the center was a shallow stone basin filled with clear water. A rumpled blanket was folded at its edge, where Wesley had been sitting. Angel dropped to his knees on the blanket and spat the disc into his cupped palms. It burned his fingers, pulsing eagerly. Scenting blood.

A howl of rage deafened him, and a whirlwind of darkness spun past the barrow-mound - Skoll, frothing and snapping, spinning in circles, chasing his own tail. Starry blood streamed from its muzzle, where both Spike's knives were embedded. A second later Angel saw Spike, clinging to the inside of the monster wolf's right hind leg like a cockleburr. He'd dug in with all four sets of claws, just above the hock, and he was ripping at the hawser-thick tendon with his fangs, trying to hamstring Skoll before the beast could pull him off. Spike always had fought dirty.

Angel set the disc down in the center of the pool, bent low and breathed upon the water. Ripples made the sun-disc writhe and flicker like the flames of the lamps. Earth, air, fire, and water. At least now, at the end, his hands were steady, requesting the boon only a living man could demand of the gods. He unsheathed his knife. If there'd ever been a formal incantation for this, it had been lost long ago, with the last breath of the last priest of a dying race. But if he'd learned anything over the years, it was that words were only the channel through which magic flowed. Desperation would have to serve.

"For every power, there is an equal and opposite power," Angel chanted. "As night follows day, as winter follows summer, as water quenches fire, so do all things in their proper season turn again. Thus is the great Balance maintained. Hear me, Sun Jaguar! We could really use some help down here!"

Skoll's jaws closed on Spike, and with a jerk of its great black head the wolf ripped the vampire free. The monster gave him a quick sharp shake, as a wolf crushes a mouse, and flung him aside. Spike slammed into the cavern wall and crumpled to the ground. The wolf turned on Angel with a snarl.

Angel inserted the point of the knife into his right eye socket. Because god-level entities didn't show up for just a pretty please.

Circle. Twist. Surprisingly difficult, extracting an eye, particularly when you didn't have the proper tools. All those tiny muscles to sever. Someone was screaming. He was pretty sure it was him. As a vampire he'd done this so many times, to so many people, and most of them had screamed, so it only made sense that he should be screaming too. Screaming as the knife clattered to the stone, screaming as blood poured down his cheek, screaming as he placed the mangled scrap of flesh ever so carefully in the center of the sun-disc. Right in the jaguar's snarling jaws, which closed, _snap._ Offering accepted.

And then he was _more._

More than a man, and less. On the night he'd first risen with the power of a demon singing in his veins, he'd looked upon mankind and seen them for the playthings that they were, but Sun Jaguar was neither demon nor angel. It was light and it was burning and it was power, the flame that could warm or destroy, the sun that could blast or nourish, for this brief moment tethered to humanity by a rope of sacrificial blood.

He flexed great mailed paws and gnashed his fangs, terrified, exultant. His enemy was before him, the creature of the great ice and the long night. Skoll bared its fangs and leaped, and Sun Jaguar rose up with a roar to meet it. When they came together, the mountain shook. Across the cavern floor they thrashed and tore and savaged one another, equally matched, equally terrible, the great black wolf and the great dappled cat. Skoll's bite was the cold between the stars, Sun Jaguar's claws the fire at the heart of the sun. Worlds turned beneath their feet as they circled, the planet-wide dance of wind and water changing its steps. Their battle was the play of the Balance itself, striving for equilibrium.

"You can't beat me, Angel," Wesley's voice echoed in his head. "Sun Jaguar will consume you from within. You haven't the strength to bind a god to earth for long."

It was true; already he felt himself the wick at the heart of a candle, burning at both ends. Spike would be proud. "Long enough," Angel gasped. "Look!"

Overhead, a ray of sunlight flicked to life - pale and feeble, but there. The eclipse was passing. Skoll flung back its head and howled in rage and despair. The wolf surged upwards in a desperate bid for freedom, but the hind leg Spike had been gnawing on failed it, and its leap fell short. Sun Jaguar's jaws closed upon its shoulders and pulled it down again, taking half the roof of the cavern with it.

Light exploded around them, as an avalanche of stone and snow and the tangled roots of trees thundered down into the cavern. Overhead the sky bled a bright clear blue as the stormclouds were rent apart, as if by the claws of a great cat. For an instant it was Wesley's face beneath him again, and superimposed upon the jaguar-god's fangs sunk deep in Skoll's throat were his own hands (still powerful, for an old man's) around Wesley's neck, trying for the grip that would cut off the sluggish flow of blood to the brain and knock even a vampire unconscious.

Wesley looked up at him, squinting, lost. Gazing into the face of the sun. His voice was husky, and faintly puzzled. "Angel," he said, as if he weren't quite sure why they were there. "All I ever wanted was..."

The shadow of the wolf fled. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was burning, burning, in the last rays of the setting sun.

With an abruptness that left him reeling, Angel was himself once more, no more the avatar of the sun but only an old man elbow-deep in a pile of hot cinders. He stumbled backwards, the ashes of his once-best friend scorching his fingers. A rock hit him in the shoulder, and he looked up dumbly. The edges of the ragged hole in the mountainside were still crumbling. To the Sun Jaguar, the collapse had been an annoying rain of pebbles, but some of those precariously balanced boulders could crush him to jelly.

It didn't really matter, did it? Climbing out through the hole Skoll had made was beyond his strength, and the falling debris had blocked off the tunnel by which they'd entered. Simply walking across the rubble-strewn floor seemed an almost impossible task just now; on top of the exhaustion, his depth perception was shot. He was going to freeze to death if he didn't find shelter, assuming he didn't die of shock and blood loss first. He couldn't work up the energy to care. He felt empty, a hollow cicada-shell of a man.

Spike would have tried to get out. He supposed he owed the little bastard the effort, at least.

Overhead the sky was purpling, and the lingering clouds were on fire, edged in scarlet and gold. In another hour or so it would be full dark. Ironically, an overcast sky would have made for a warmer night. Angel checked his cell phone; no signal, of course. He picked his way over to a slab of fallen stone leaning against the cavern wall, and crawled into the little space beneath. He should try to gather some wood for a fire. But it was easier to just lean against the wall, become one with the marching lines of runes etched into the stone. He wondered if Wesley had ever finished translating them, and what story they'd told. After a moment, he slid down the wall and sat. Not moving was good.

He was too tired to be surprised when he looked down and saw the pale, dirty hand on the ground at his side. Spike lay half-buried beneath a lattice of snapped branches, which had shielded him from the worst of the falling debris. He studied the long, nervous, nicotine-stained fingers with their perpetually bitten nails, the knuckles that had been broken and re-broken more often than Angel could count. The strong, slim wrist disappeared into a battered black leather coat-sleeve at an angle usually reserved for discarded GI Joes.

Maybe he ought to do something about that. Splints, or... a search through Spike's pockets produced the hip flask. Angel gave it a shake; better than half full. He shifted the branches aside, took hold of Spike's wrist with one hand, braced the other against Spike's shoulder and pulled. The vampire came to with a yell, flailing with his unbroken arm. Angel fended off the wild punch and held up the flask. "Drink up. You're going to need it. There's still both legs to go."

Gathering darkness smudged Spike's features, re-drew them in harsh strokes of pain. "No point, mate. I'm done. I know what a broken spine feels like."

_And you lived to bitch about it._ But even if he made it through the night, even if he found a way out of this hole in the morning, he'd be in no shape to haul Spike with him... and Spike, Living and Breathing Edition, probably couldn't be moved safely anyway. "You should have listened when I told you to go home."

Bloodied lips parted in a humorless grin. "Don't get sentimental on me, Liam. I've had a good run. Made my threescore and ten. Tell Buffy I went out fighting, yeh?" Spike eyed the flask. "Could still use that drink. And while you're at it, let's have a fire. If I'm going to kick it, might as well be in comfort."

There were enough shattered fir trees in the landfall to fuel a dozen bonfires, but most of the wood was green or soaking wet. By the time Angel managed to coax a sullen, smoky blaze to life, cold white icepick stars were beginning to stab through the indigo sky. Spike, his head propped up on a prickly cushion of fir boughs, devoted himself to knocking back whiskey with single-minded determination. Presently he said, "You ever notice we get along best when one of us's had the shit beaten out of him?"

"It's crossed my mind." Angel collapsed beside the fire with a grunt. "Go easy on that. You're gonna pass out."

"'S the general idea," Spike mumbled. He handed Angel the decimated flask and fell back with a cough. "Sorry 'bout Pryce," he said after a moment.

Angel thought about a small bare room in the bowels of Wolfram &amp; Hart's L.A. branch, and what Wesley had done to Spike there. "No, you're not."

Spike shrugged, one-shouldered. "Yeh, well, good form for the white hats to pretend otherwise, innit?"

Angel contemplated the engraving on the flask, rubbing his thumb across the etched letters. _To William the Dorky, Love Dawn Summers._ No matter where he was bound afterwards, Spike would tear a hole in the world in the leaving of it. If he himself died tonight, there'd be no one left to carry the news to. He tipped the flask up and drained the dregs. The Jack Daniels burned its way down his throat, igniting a false warmth in his belly. It figured - the last whiskey he'd taste on this earth, and it wasn't a single malt. "Why are you here, Spike?"

"Beer 'n cigarettes, I believe it was." Spike's lashes were starting to droop again, and his voice was starting to slur; the JD must be kicking in. "Speaking of which, roll me a fag. Other pocket." He watched critically as Angel fumbled for papers and lighter with numb fingers. "Christ, you roll like a girl."

"Can you be serious for - " But it wasn't worth the effort. Angel lit the cigarette, held it out to Spike. "Forget it. It doesn't matter."

"Whatever reasons I've got," Spike closed his eyes and took a deep grateful drag, "they won't be good enough for you." He let smoke trickle from his nose for a minute or so. "I ever tell you I had an epiphany once? When Buffy and me closed the Hellmouth. Just for that minute." He waved his cigarette vaguely, scattering ash across worn black leather. "'s all connected. Trees 'n people 'n goldfish 'n...'n bloody paramecia. Took being dead to see it. Terrible n' glorious, life is. Any wonder I grabbed for it, first chance I got?"

Angel rolled over and chucked the fircone that was drilling through his shoulder blades into the darkness. "Spike, I'm beat. Can we skip the meaning of life?"

"Doesn't _mean_ anything. Just is." Spike's lips curved in a drowsy smile. "The world has its hooks in me, right down to the bone. Everyone we touch, everything we do, there's strings attached. That's why I'm here. 'Spect you don't need ties that bind to do right, seeing as you've a soul. Cut all your strings and you're still here, yeh? What I can't make out is..." Spike stared muzzily at the fag-end of his cigarette, as if its embers contained the mysteries of Angel's psyche, then tossed it into the fire. "If there's not a single solitary soul you care about enough to do good _for_, what's the sodding point?"

Spike's lashes fluttered shut. His hand went slack, and after a moment dropped to the ground. Angel watched the silhouette of his chest rise and fall, ever more slowly, against the backdrop of flame. "Hell if I know," he whispered. He reached over and tucked the hand under the edge of Spike's jacket. It didn't seem right to let go, not just yet.

He was still holding on when the silhouette appeared on the rim of the shattered cavern overhead, dark against a dark sky. Unsurprised, Angel watched it draw closer, picking its surefooted way down the broken slope until it disappeared into the inky shadow of the cavern wall. The watcher on their trail. Wesley's last surprise. If he'd still possessed a vampire's senses, he could have heard it, smelled it, seen it coming, but it didn't really matter. Whatever it was, if it had survived that storm in the open, it couldn't be human.

A good half an hour later, their pursuer stepped into the firelight - a slim, cat-silent figure bundled in fur and leather, not much taller than Spike. He touched the silver stud in his ear and said, "I found them."

He turned to Angel, knelt. Licked his lips. "Hey. Dad."

****

The room was dark when Angel woke. Monitors winked in the shadows, red and blue and amber. In the bed on the opposite side of the room, Spike was asleep, or unconscious, his lashes a slash of charcoal across chalk-white cheeks. Both legs and one arm were in casts, and his ribs and shoulder were tightly taped. He was clutching a rumpled bundle of cloth in his good arm.

On the wall facing them, _Casablanca_ played on a flatscreen with the sound turned off - the real thing, not that crappy 'enhanced' version that had come out in the 'teens, with Ronald Reagan 'shopped in for Humphrey Bogart. Not Hell, then. A hospital - or, more likely, a private clinic. The decor seemed a little upscale for County, and the window had heavy, sun-proof shades. Gregson's, maybe; they catered to a demon clientele.

A hundred small aches circled just below the fog of painkillers, like barracuda poised to sink their teeth in. Deeper yet were a couple closer to shark-sized, just waiting their turn to surface. His throat was lined with cotton, and his hands and feet throbbed in time to the slow, dark red pulse behind his eyes. Eye. Angel lifted one hand, sticky with medicinal goo beneath its mummy-thick gauze mitten, and patted the bandages taped over his eye socket. Yep, still gone. _Here's looking at you, kid._

Wesley was still gone, too. He supposed he'd get used to the hole, in time.

The bundle of cloth stirred, and Angel realized that it was Buffy - she'd fallen asleep in a chair, her head on Spike's chest and one hand spread protectively over his heart. He must have made some sound, because she roused with a start. For an instant the full force of the awakened Slayer's gaze was upon him, fierce and indomitable in defense of the fallen. "Angel," she whispered, and relaxed. "I didn't think you'd be awake until tomorrow."

In her laundry-day sweatshirt, with her face free of makeup, she looked tired. Exhausted, even, as though she were the one just pulled off a mountain by the National Guard. The years had scrimshawed new lines around the generous mouth and those still-luminous agate eyes, and all her features were somehow sharper and more distinctly _Buffy_, honed by the force of the will behind them. She was no longer young, but she would always be beautiful.

"The eclipse," Angel croaked. "Did we stop the storm?"

Buffy ducked under Spike's elbow with a yawn and stretched, grimacing as her joints cracked. She raked her hair off her neck - still blonde, but at some point the sunny gold of her youth had muted to a subtler shade that took the fifth on hiding grey. Twisting the fall of hair into an untidy bun, she rounded the bed to get the pitcher. "Yup. And not just that storm. The Weather Channel's ratings are through the roof." She poured him a cup of water and handed it over, lips pressed tight in Slayerly disapproval. "You could have asked for help."

_Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was never your friend._ Angel took a sip of water and nodded at Spike. "I did."

Buffy sighed and sat down on the edge of his bed, hands folded in her lap. "The doctors say you have frostbite. They've got you on tissue regeneration therapy, but you still might lose a toe."

"A toe." He started to laugh, but it hurt too much.

"Angel." She laced her fingers together - they seemed thinner, the joints more prominent, than he remembered them. So small, her hands, in keeping with the rest of her, and even now, so terribly strong. "You know I care about you, right? You know that you're important to me, and that you'll always have a place in my heart, and...there were things I didn't get when I was younger, and I do get them now, and it's kind of late and pointless to say I'm sorry, but I just want you to know that, OK?"

The anxious little wrinkle between her brows was a constant. "I know." For all the good it did either of them.

"Good. Good." She took a deep breath and folded her arms beneath her breasts. Classic defensive Buffy. "So don't take this the wrong way when I tell you... this has to stop."

"This what?" Angel asked. His head was starting to ache. "Where's the callpad for the nurse?"

"It's the red button. _This_ this," she said, waving at Spike's immobile form. "Every few years you pop up out of nowhere and pretend like you don't want his help except there's this one little errand he can run for you, and then you're gone for a month and Spike comes home looking like something the cat dragged in. And every time? It's a bigger cat."

"His choice. I've never - "

Age could not wither nor custom stale the Summers eye-roll. "He loves you, you moron. He'd walk through fire for a 'Good job, Spike, I'm proud of you!' Which you've never given him. Sometimes I think that's on purpose. So he'll try harder for you next time."

The headache might be related to the fact that he was clenching his jaw hard enough to break teeth. "I'm not going to pat Spike on the back for being slightly less evil than he could be. He's got you for that."

Buffy stilled, and her fingers curled in upon themselves, fist upon fist. Between Spike and the Slayer anger could sublime into passion; between the two of them, it could only fester. But perhaps the Slayer, too, had learned a few things in forty years. She tipped her head to one side, studying him with the concentration of a boxer divining her opponent's weak spots. "So tell me. Why do you keep coming back for his help?"

Angel let his head sink back against the pillows, and closed his eyes. Lawson, Doyle, Connor, Gunn... _Because he's the only one I can't destroy. He's already damned._ There were words too dangerous to speak, and not all of them lay hidden between the covers of ancient spellbooks. "Because for the kind of help I need, he's the only one I can go to."

He was too tired to waste energy on expectations, so the feather-brush of her fingertips on his forearm was less of a surprise than it should have been. They didn't touch, he and Buffy, for a million good reasons and a million bad ones. But now her fingers trailed up his arm, light as snowfall and just as inexorable. Her hand came to rest upon his shoulder, small and warm and strong, just as he remembered it; and it very nearly unmanned him. Loss and longing and loneliness paralyzed his tongue, so enormous, so overwhelming no words could encompass them, and he could only lie still, shuddering under her hand.

"You're right," Buffy whispered. "Spike doesn't save the world because it's the right thing to do. He does it because he just... likes the world."

She rose, the mattress rebounding from her slight weight. He didn't reach out to stop her. How much would have changed over the years if he had done so, at any one of the many points when one of them had turned and walked away? _She's with me because you let her go,_ Spike had told him once, and it was true. But if he had held on... he saw Wesley's face again, as it dissolved into dust. Gone, like all the rest of them.

"You think less of me for loving him." It wasn't a question. "But sometimes? More than anything else, I need that. Someone who thinks the world is a place worth saving." Buffy's voice, her footsteps, receded. When Angel opened his eyes, she was standing beside Spike's bed, gazing down, her face in shadow. "Because otherwise... what we do is right. And good." Her fingers threaded through Spike's matted curls, teasing out snarls. "And empty."

She looked at him, and where he'd expected challenge, her eyes held compassion. The Slayer never demanded more of you than she demanded of herself. "I'm selfish, Angel. I love him. And I want him to die with someone who loves him back. Do you understand?"

He nodded. There were words too dangerous to speak aloud. But the Slayer, of a mercy, knew that as well as he did.

****

By the end of the week, Angel had decided that he was in Hell, after all. Hell had nothing to do with flames and pitchforks. Hell was a small pale green room equipped with a very, very bored Spike, buzzing for the nurse every ten seconds, complaining that his cast itched, there was nothing worth watching on telly, he was thirsty, he had to take a piss and no he wasn't going to use the sodding bedpan, and why the hell couldn't he have a smoke, no better place to come down with lung cancer than a hospital. They'd taken the cast off his arm yesterday, but having two free hands just made him twice as fidgety.

Luckily, Hell also had visiting hours.

Spike sat propped up against a small mountain of pillows, surrounded by an astonishing array of junk - reading glasses, iPod, stacks of lurid paperbacks, palm-sized game consoles, notebook and pens, a set of free weights, and a handful of get well cards, the most prominent of which read, _Hey, Spike - Aren't you dead _yet?_ No love, Xander_. The girl seated on his lap was five, maybe. Her brother, sprawled across the foot of Spike's bed, was eight or nine. He wore a frown of tremendous concentration as he drew something with far too many teeth on Spike's cast with a Sharpie.

"...so there your Dad an' I were, stuck in the estuary like a pair of clams till the sun went down. The dangerous bit in sunlight only goes down so far, see, so's long as we stayed underwater we were safe. Cold an' dark an' muddy, it was, but we'd nothing better to do, and we decided to have a look about us. Wasn't easy going, I'll tell you. There was rubbish of all sorts on the bottom of the sea. Broken lobster traps and smashed crockery and old Wellingtons... and then we saw it. A bloody great wreck of a ship, with the Jolly Roger still waving from the mizzenmast."

"Pirates!" the girl gasped. "Was there treasure?"

"Loads of it."

Her brother looked up, flipping dark hair from his eyes. "Were there sharks?"

"What d'you think was guarding the sunken treasure?"

Angel watched moodily. The scene could have materialized out of a Norman Rockwell painting: The edges of the window-blinds glowing gold with the afternoon sun, Spike's grey head bent over the girl's honey-brown curls as she snuggled confidingly under his chin, the boy's eager, upturned face... _Hey, boys and girls! Guess what? Your grandad used to eat kids just like you for breakfast!_

"If a shark bit me," the girl announced, morphing into defiant game face, "I'd bite it right back!"

OK, maybe not just like them.

"...we could see the pieces of eight through the portholes. And jewels, too, heaps and heaps of 'em, pearls and rubies and emeralds, all glittering in the sun - "

"I thought you said there wasn't any sunlight that far down," Angel muttered.

Spike gave him a reproachful look. "Now, mate, were you there? I seem to recall you'd already scarpered off to Pepperland."

"No," Angel replied crossly. "But I know a little bit about what it's like being stuck on the bottom of the ocean."

Both children regarded him curiously. "Who're you?" the boy asked.

"He's the scurvy dog who chucked your Dad and me off the submarine," Spike informed them. "He's by way of being my grandpa. Now are you lot going to hush and let me finish the story, or do I have to nail your jaws shut?"

Both children shook their heads vigorously. The girl leaned over and whispered to Angel, "He won't really. He just says that."

_That's what you think._ Angel rolled over as Spike swung into a graphic demonstration of underwater shark-fighting, to the children's vocal delight. In the last week, the entire Summers-Pratt clan had made an appearance at one point or another, a constant parade of children and grandchildren and significant others. He'd met some of them before, but it had been so long. Babes in arms were lanky teenagers now, and former lanky teenagers came waltzing in with their own babes in arms.

His own visitors had been few and far between - the representative from his health insurance, and a terse consultation with Charles Gunn to update his will. He hadn't seen Connor since that night on the mountain. Looking back, it seemed more and more likely that the whole thing had been some kind of bizarre, hypothermia-induced hallucination. No sense at all railing _It's just not fair,_ even to himself, because he knew better than anyone that fairness had nothing to do with it. He'd made his choices, and this was the life that came with them. It was just... he'd been good with kids, once. Crap with teenagers, but good with kids.

"Hey, you two." Buffy strolled in, pushing a wheelchair, a neat stack of dark clothing tucked under one arm. "Go easy on your grandfather. You break him, we have to buy him."

She looked fresher and more rested today, crisp and cool in white linen, though worry and weariness still lurked in the corners of her eyes. Spike looked her up and down with a salacious grin. "Hello, Nurse. Come to help me get my britches on?"

Buffy raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth curling in a smile. She steered the chair over to Spike's bedside and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. "That would be a first. Come on, kids." She handed the boy a duffle bag. "Get your grandfather's stuff packed up, and scoot down to the front entrance. Your mother's bringing the car around."

Both children hopped off the bed and scurried to gather up Spike's belongings, and Buffy moved to lift Spike out of bed. Spike shoved her hand away with a growl. "For Christ's sake, Slayer, I'm not helpless."

For a second it looked as if Buffy would snap back, but she bit her lip and stepped away while Spike wrestled first one and then the other fiberglass-encased leg over the edge of the bed. He perched there, panting a little, eyeing the wheelchair with loathing, then grabbed the bed-rails and heaved himself up, muscles cording as he took all his weight on his arms. Buffy held the wheelchair steady as Spike levered himself into it, only relaxing when he finally collapsed into its seat in triumph.

"There, pet. Told you I could manage," Spike said, patting her hand. "Not much sense in calling it a walking cast if no one lets me walk in it, yeh? Comes off in another week, anyway. I'll be on my feet again in no time."

Buffy shot a look at Angel. There was no doubt the broken bones would heal, but it had taken long months even for vampire-fast healing to repair the nerve damage the last time this had happened. Spike knew it; insouciance and temper both masked a deeper fear. _What if this time..._ But Spike had made his choices too, and taken the life that came with them. Perhaps it wasn't only the lack of a soul that made him regret them less.

An acerbic voice from the hallway inquired, "So is the Addams Family Reunion over yet? Because I've got things to discuss with Mr. I Vant To Be Alone while he's immobile, and can't skip out on me." Without waiting for a reply, the owner of the voice swept into the room, at the head of an entourage of secretaries, security drones, and hopeful reporters.

Cordelia Chase was battling time with all the guile, skill, and moisturizer at her command, and Angel wasn't inclined to look too hard for signs that she was losing. Her hair was still dark, swept up in an elegant chignon to complement her equally elegant claret suit dress, and expert plastic surgery had long since erased the old scar at her throat. He wasn't sure if it was disturbing or encouraging that even now, the thought of that scar could still get him hard.

"Didn't I mention?" Buffy said with an impish grim. "You're not the only one who can ask for help. Thanks, Cordy. I owe you one." She wheeled Spike into the bathroom, and the door clicked shut behind them.

"Any time," Cordelia replied. She rounded on Angel, head cocked, hands on her hips. "Well. Long time no see."

Of all the people he hadn't been expecting... "_You?_ You were following us?"

"Not personally." Cordelia inspected her flawless nails. "I have people for that. Honestly, did you seriously think that you could steal a major magical artifact and no one would notice? That is so twentieth century. My office gets an alert from the Mexican government that the Boca del Jaguar has gone poof, plus there's a major mystic vortex shaping up in the Sierra Nevadas on the eve of a total eclipse? You bet your bippy I had someone check it out. The guys in Bishop," she added, "were mine. Or one of them, anyway. The other one really does work for the FBI."

Oh. "Good thing Spike didn't kill them much, then."

"I'm sending their medical bills to Bloody Vengeance Inc." Cordelia tapped her temple, where the tiny jeweled stud of her cell implant winked. "When they reported back to me, I called Buffy and we put two and two together. Buffy traced Spike through the GPS tracker in his cell implant until Wesley's magic snowstorm fritzed the satellite reception. And then I had to call in a specialist."

Cordelia beckoned. The security types parted like the Red Sea. The man in the doorway swallowed hard, staring at Angel with something between longing, hunger, and sheer panic.

"Connor," Angel whispered.

Connor took a hesitant step forward. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt now, but he still looked lean as a coyote and twice as skittish. Any hint of boyish softness was long gone from his darkly tanned face. Dark hair streaked with grey fell in two braids over his rangy shoulders, and beneath the brim of his battered fedora, his eyes were as bright as a wild thing's. "Hey."

A thousand questions jostled for first place in Angel's brain - _Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why did you come back?_ None of them managed to fight its way to supremacy before the bathroom door opened, and Buffy and Spike emerged - Spike had traded in his much-despised hospital gown for a _Bleed For Me_ t-shirt and a pair of black sweatpants stretchy enough to fit over the leg casts. He looked from Angel to Connor with a smirk. "All's revealed, is it? Told you if anyone was following us they were a better tracker than I am."

"You _knew?_" Angel growled. "How long?"

Spike shrugged. "I didn't know. Just had a notion. Didn't strike me as sensical that one of Pryce's minions would be following us, 'stead of lying in wait. But I could have been wrong, and since you were dead set on going it alone I didn't want to ruin your fun."

Connor wiped his palms on his jeans and backed nervously towards the door. "Yeah. Well. I should be - "

"_Sit_," Cordelia snapped, and father and son flinched in unison. "The rest of you, please be elsewhere. I'm going to have a nice long talk with Lunkhead and Lunkhead Junior."

The entourage began to empty into the hall. Spike spun his wheelchair around like a drag racer and leered up at Buffy. "Come on, love, let's leave them to it and get to work on all that regular physical therapy I'll be needing."

"Pig," Buffy said fondly. Halfway to the door she stopped. "Oh, wait! I almost forgot." She dug frantically through her purse, and came up with a small cream-colored envelope. She thrust it at Angel. "Here."

Angel stared down at the envelope. _To Angel and Guest._ He plucked at the flap with bandaged fingers. The card inside read _You are cordially invited to the wedding of Constance Aileen Summers-Pratt and Samuel Albert Lawson._

It would be easier to send a card. Or a check. Or not to reply at all. "I'll be there," he said. "And Spike - "

Halfway out the door, Spike glanced over his shoulder. "Yeh?"

"You did... all right out there."

That grin hadn't aged a day. "Be seeing you, Grandsire. Make yourself a little heaven for a change, yeh?"

And they were gone. Angel tucked the invitation away carefully, and looked up at his... at Connor and Cordelia. "OK, he said. "I'm listening."

### The End


End file.
